Supreme Commander

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3223 patch applied. Supreme Commander is developed by Chris Taylor, the creator of the Total Annihilation series, and his development team, Gas Powered Games. Together, Taylor and his team have created what is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to one of the greatest RTS games of all time.

SupCom is a hugely tactical and strategic monster on a massive scale -- hundreds of units can appear on screen at once. It's a massive departure from anything else we've recently seen in the genre. It's one of (if not) the first RTS to allow the player to scroll out to view the scale of battle in its entirety.

We used the game's in-built performance test during our testing, as this provides over seven minutes of variable gameplay -- both zoomed in and out -- that should represent typical scenarios that a user is likely to encounter whilst playing the game. Due to the massive scale of the game, it's incredibly hard to accurately quantify performance in any other way. All in-game settings were set to high with no anti-aliasing and anisotropy.





There is the obvious low result with the dual x16 at 2560x1600, which was tested and retested but it still came out the same - the drop between two identical 50.6fps results to just 29.0fps is certainly anomalous. It would probably be attributed to a slightly immature BIOS on the P5E3 Deluxe. The dual x8 P35 board is always just two or three frames per second faster than the x16/x4 P35 board on all accounts so there isn't much between them all in Supreme Commander.